Typically, sociology organizes its debates around a series of issues, which are addressed by presenting opposing alternative pairs. Various theoretical exercises shape this task using the notions of dichotomies, dilemmas, and guiding distinctions. In this article, we begin with a review of this literature, focusing on how these approaches conceptualize relationships and the goals they pursue, before supporting our choice to focus on tensions. Subsequently, we adopt Niklas Luhmann’s Social Systems Theory as the central empirical reference, using the categories of position, conception, and general conception to guide our analysis. Specifically, we explore his conception in three classic tensions that have structured sociological thought since its foundation: individual/society, referring to the delimitation of the discipline’s object of study; knowledge/reality, concerning the foundation of scientific knowledge; and description/critique, regarding the orientation of sociological practice. Given that dualism predominates in the Luhmannian conception, we complement the analysis of each tension with examples of monistic and integrative conceptions. Finally, the conclusions present the results, outlining the potential of our analytical framework.
Introducción: La comunicación y la información han ido evolucionando con el paso del tiempo. La entrada de la red e Internet han generado una transformación en el paradigma de la comunicación, hasta el punto en que, los medios tradicionales como la radio, la prensa o la televisión, se han visto superados por la entrada de nuevas redes sociales. Entre estas se encuentran las conocidas como plataformas de streaming. Son uno de los principales núcleos modernos. Sitio elegido por importantes comunicadores para dar a conocer la información y generar una amplía comunidad pública, donde poder llegar a un marco más global. La presente investigación analiza el desarrollo de la comunicación deportiva dentro del mundo del fútbol, seleccionando como propuesta, una de las redes sociales más influyentes dentro del ámbito de la red, Twitch. Y, los canales más influyentes en España: “Gerard Romero”, “RubenMartinweb” y “El ChiringuitoTV”. Metodología: Para el correcto desarrollo de la investigación se ha utilizado una metodología mixta. Basada en una parte cuantitativa y cualitativa del fenómeno para abarcar distintas perspectivas y comprender el conjunto de los datos adquiridos con el objetivo de conseguir resultados verídicos y enriquecedores. Por ello se ha dividido en tres partes: Un estudio del origen e influencia de los estudios de caso, la transformación y el desarrollo de la plataforma con respecto a los canales y los momentos más relevantes e importantes para la audiencia. Resultados: Los resultados muestran la transformación vivida por la comunicación deportiva dentro del mundo del fútbol a lo largo de los años. A su vez, se observa la entrada de las redes sociales y las plataformas de streaming en el fenómeno, junto a la influencia de las nuevas figuras comunicativas encargadas de dar a conocer lo ocurrido. Discusión y conclusiones: Se considera el crecimiento vivido por parte de la comunicación deportiva dentro del fútbol y se reflexiona sobre las razones de su expansión, junto al futuro más próximo.
This paper develops an agentic framework that employs large language models (LLMs) for grounded persuasive language generation in automated copywriting, with real estate marketing as a focal application. Our method is designed to align the generated content with user preferences while highlighting useful factual attributes. This agent consists of three key modules: (1) Grounding Module, mimicking expert human behavior to predict marketable features; (2) Personalization Module, aligning content with user preferences; (3) Marketing Module, ensuring factual accuracy and the inclusion of localized features. We conduct systematic human-subject experiments in the domain of real estate marketing, with a focus group of potential house buyers. The results demonstrate that marketing descriptions generated by our approach are preferred over those written by human experts by a clear margin while maintaining the same level of factual accuracy. Our findings suggest a promising agentic approach to automate large-scale targeted copywriting while ensuring factuality of content generation.
Large language models (LLMs) show strong potential for simulating human social behaviors and interactions, yet lack large-scale, systematically constructed benchmarks for evaluating their alignment with real-world social attitudes. To bridge this gap, we introduce SocioBench-a comprehensive benchmark derived from the annually collected, standardized survey data of the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP). The benchmark aggregates over 480,000 real respondent records from more than 30 countries, spanning 10 sociological domains and over 40 demographic attributes. Our experiments indicate that LLMs achieve only 30-40% accuracy when simulating individuals in complex survey scenarios, with statistically significant differences across domains and demographic subgroups. These findings highlight several limitations of current LLMs in survey scenarios, including insufficient individual-level data coverage, inadequate scenario diversity, and missing group-level modeling.
Rosa del Carmen Castillo Valenzuela, Salvador Ruiz Cerrillo, Serena Brigidi
Objective: to analyze the effectiveness of a promotion and human milk donation program in a virtual group of Mexican women. Material and methods: a non-statistical sampling of 5 Mexican women was used, as a main tool a questionnaire of 37 open-ended questions was applied through the in-depth interview technique. Results: with the 6-month campaign of sensibilization and promotion to the donation inside the virtual group, 12 Mexican women could become active donors, getting 21,595 ml of donated human milk. Conclusions: support and promotional human milk virtual groups in social networks show an effectiveness based on the consolidation of support networks and personal significance.
Uzungöl is a popular natural route and a major tourist attraction in Turkey, but recently overtourism has become a major problem. With the increase in the number of visitors, rapid construction, concreting and various forms of pollution have had a negative impact on the destination of Uzungöl and its environment. The aim of this study is to reveal the evidence for the existence of overtourism in Uzungöl through visitors’ reviews on online platforms and to determine in which areas overtourism is effective. In this study, which was conducted using an exploratory approach, it was observed that many visitors reviewed on overtourism in Uzungöl using TripAdvisor. These reviews were analysed using content analysis. As a result of the analysis, it was found that visitors’ reviews focused on three themes related to overtourism in Uzungöl. These are environmental, economic, and socio-cultural themes. As a result of the study, it was determined that environmental concerns are more prominent in terms of overtourism. In addition, it
was understood that tourists visiting the region have a negative image in terms of overbuilding, concretisation, and unplanned urbanisation.
Hlengiwe P. Maila, Lianne P. Malan, Adrino Mazenda
Background: The public housing delivery practices in South Africa are fragmented, resulting in various outcomes concerning housing delivery. There is a pressing need to overhaul public housing delivery that puts citizens at the core of the delivery process.
Aim: The current state-led model of delivering housing is not effective and by design, the model for housing delivery should include the participation of beneficiaries. The aim was to develop a co-production model for housing delivery.
Setting: The article focused on the housing sector in South Africa.
Methods: A qualitative research approach and grounded theory as research design was used. Instruments were document analysis and semi-structured interviews with participants who are stakeholders in housing co-production. Data collected was analysed through inductive thematic analysis.
Results: The results suggested a self-reliant approach to housing delivery, which is demand driven with the state as a facilitator and not the provider of housing. The model for housing should have a component that does not perpetuate a culture of dependency and entitlement but promotes the concept of co-production.
Conclusion: The article explored the possibility of introducing a co-production model for housing delivery model in South Africa. It was established that the role of government must shift to that of an enabler and facilitator instead of a provider of housing.
Contribution: This proposed model contributes towards the body of knowledge in terms of promoting public service delivery and performance (in this instance in the housing sector) in South Africa as a country situated in Africa.
Political institutions and public administration (General), Regional planning
We address the challenge of acquiring real-world manipulation skills with a scalable framework. We hold the belief that identifying an appropriate prediction target capable of leveraging large-scale datasets is crucial for achieving efficient and universal learning. Therefore, we propose to utilize 3D flow, which represents the future trajectories of 3D points on objects of interest, as an ideal prediction target. To exploit scalable data resources, we turn our attention to human videos. We develop, for the first time, a language-conditioned 3D flow prediction model directly from large-scale RGBD human video datasets. Our predicted flow offers actionable guidance, thus facilitating zero-shot skill transfer in real-world scenarios. We deploy our method with a policy based on closed-loop flow prediction. Remarkably, without any in-domain finetuning, our method achieves an impressive 81\% success rate in zero-shot human-to-robot skill transfer, covering 18 tasks in 6 scenes. Our framework features the following benefits: (1) scalability: leveraging cross-embodiment data resources; (2) wide application: multiple object categories, including rigid, articulated, and soft bodies; (3) stable skill transfer: providing actionable guidance with a small inference domain-gap. Code, data, and supplementary materials are available https://general-flow.github.io
We study generalized anti-self-dual instantons defined over Riemannian manifolds equipped with a parallel codimension-$4$ differential form. In particular, for product Riemannian manifolds possessing such a form, we study dimension reduction phenomena, finding a topological criterion for bundles which, when satisfied, allows for a complete characterization of dimension reduction for the corresponding moduli space of generalized ASD instantons. By establishing an integrability result for families of connections, we then deduce explicit descriptions for these moduli spaces, including those of Hermitian Yang--Mills connections, $G_2$-, and $\Spin(7)$-instantons. When one factor in the product is a $4$-manifold, we establish well-behaved compactifications for these moduli spaces.
Szukając odpowiedzi na pytanie czy Jezus jest Bogiem, P.Lisicki w pierwszej kolejności analizuje krytyczne koncepcje, zwracając uwagę na błędne przypuszczenia i niewłaściwe wnioski. Następnie prezentuje stanowisko współczesnych biblistów, którzy zrekonstruowali proces narodzin kultu Jezusa. W końcu, prezentuje swą własną argumentację, ukazując pierwotną koncepcje deifikacji Mistrza z Nazaretu. Argumentacja prezentowana przez P. Lisickiego jest dojrzałą apologią Jezusa jako Boga.
IntroductionThis work aims at transposing ethnographic research into digital contexts to probe its potential and limitations in a specific field of study: that of sexuality, particularly suited to ethnographic exploration. We chose as our case study a web community of Italian asexual people. As we shall see, this allowed us to simultaneously explore both the various techniques called into play in digital ethnography and the digital as a specific sphere within which sexuality takes on a very peculiar meaning. Digital sociality is paramount for the definition of imaginaries, meanings, and practices that could not be explored elsewhere. This is due to the implicit characteristics of the population studied, which does not find corresponding physical spaces of aggregation.MethodsThe paper will present the research design using this specific case study to address some of the typical dilemmas that researchers face when following the digital ethnographic approach and will explore the research results as an example of the kind of analysis available with the information and data collected through this method.Results and discussionThe conclusions will attempt to briefly outline the shortfalls and advantages of this method, considering its application to this specific field of study.
The general relativistic Poynting-Robertson (PR) effect is a very important dissipative phenomenon occurring in high-energy astrophysics. Recently, it has been proposed a new model, which upgrades the two-dimensional (2D) description in the three-dimensional (3D) case in Kerr spacetime. The radiation field is considered as constituted by photons emitted from a rigidly rotating spherical source around the compact object. Such dynamical system admits the existence of a critical hypersurface, region where the gravitational and radiation forces balance and the matter reaches it at the end of its motion. Selected test particle orbits are displayed. We show how to prove the stability of these critical hypersurfaces within the Lyapunov theory. Then, we present how to study such effect under the Lagrangian formalism, explaining how to analytically derive the Rayleigh potential for the radiation force. In conclusion, further developments and future projects are discussed.
The long-term resilient property of ecosystems has been quantified as ecological robustness (RECO) in terms of the energy transfer over food webs. The RECO of resilient ecosystems favors a balance of food webs' network efficiency and redundancy. By integrating RECO with power system constraints, the authors are able to optimize power systems' inherent resilience as ecosystems through network design and system operation. A previous model used on real power flows and aggregated redundant components for a rigorous mapping between ecosystems and power systems. However, the reactive power flows also determine power systems resilience; and the power components' redundancy is part of the global network redundancy. These characteristics should be considered for RECO-oriented evaluation and optimization for power systems. Thus, this paper extends the model for quantifying RECO in power systems using real, reactive, and apparent power flows with the consideration of redundant placement of generators. Recalling the performance of RECO-oriented optimal power flows under N-x contingencies, the analyses suggest reactive power flows and redundant components should be included for RECO to capture power systems' inherent resilience.
Cultural General Intelligence Team, Avishkar Bhoopchand, Bethanie Brownfield
et al.
Cultural transmission is the domain-general social skill that allows agents to acquire and use information from each other in real-time with high fidelity and recall. In humans, it is the inheritance process that powers cumulative cultural evolution, expanding our skills, tools and knowledge across generations. We provide a method for generating zero-shot, high recall cultural transmission in artificially intelligent agents. Our agents succeed at real-time cultural transmission from humans in novel contexts without using any pre-collected human data. We identify a surprisingly simple set of ingredients sufficient for generating cultural transmission and develop an evaluation methodology for rigorously assessing it. This paves the way for cultural evolution as an algorithm for developing artificial general intelligence.
Tyler Cody, Niloofar Shadab, Alejandro Salado
et al.
Engineering methods are centered around traditional notions of decomposition and recomposition that rely on partitioning the inputs and outputs of components to allow for component-level properties to hold after their composition. In artificial intelligence (AI), however, systems are often expected to influence their environments, and, by way of their environments, to influence themselves. Thus, it is unclear if an AI system's inputs will be independent of its outputs, and, therefore, if AI systems can be treated as traditional components. This paper posits that engineering general intelligence requires new general systems precepts, termed the core and periphery, and explores their theoretical uses. The new precepts are elaborated using abstract systems theory and the Law of Requisite Variety. By using the presented material, engineers can better understand the general character of regulating the outcomes of AI to achieve stakeholder needs and how the general systems nature of embodiment challenges traditional engineering practice.
This article outlines the theory of securing. It explains the feelings of insecurity of ordinary people and how they secure themselves. Securing is a basic social psychological process of “becoming” where the person’s selfhood is formed by how they continuously deal with their feelings of insecurity. This process has two interrelated stages: (1) instantaneous relieving and (2) honesting. When they engage instantaneous relieving and increasingly trapped in a vicious cycle, they become a lesser version of themselves. However, when they transition into honesting, they recover and continuously realize a better version of themselves. This theory has implications in helping professions and future research on personal growth and optimal functioning.
Resumo Este artigo apresenta o estatativismo. Trata-se tanto de um conceito que descreve um conjunto de práticas estatísticas voltadas para a emancipação, como de uma palavra de ordem que convoca atores sociais a utilizarem-se do poder da quantificação em suas lutas, ao invés de rejeitá-lo e entregá-lo às instituições poderosas. Quatro formas de estatativismo são apresentadas: mostrar as contradições internas das instituições, flexibilizar as regras, identificar grupos sociais em luta e propor indicadores alternativos.◊
Laila Loudiki, Mustapha Kchikech, El Hassan Essaky
Due to their broad application to different fields of theory and practice, generalized Petersen graphs $GPG(n,s)$ have been extensively investigated. Despite the regularity of generalized Petersen graphs, determining an exact formula for the diameter is still a difficult problem. In their paper, Beenker and Van Lint have proved that if the circulant graph $C_n(1,s)$ has diameter $d$, then $GPG(n,s)$ has diameter at least $d+1$ and at most $d+2$. In this paper, we provide necessary and sufficient conditions so that the diameter of $GPG(n,s)$ is equal to $d+1,$ and sufficient conditions so that the diameter of $GPG(n,s)$ is equal to $d+2.$ Afterwards, we give exact values for the diameter of $GPG(n,s)$ for almost all cases of $n$ and $s.$ Furthermore, we show that there exists an algorithm computing the diameter of generalized Petersen graphs with running time $O$(log$n$).
Alexander Gallego Cadavid, Yeinzon Rodriguez, L. Gabriel Gomez
As a modified gravity theory that introduces new gravitational degrees of freedom, the generalized SU(2) Proca theory (GSU2P for short) is the non-Abelian version of the well-known generalized Proca theory where the action is invariant under global transformations of the SU(2) group. This theory was formulated for the first time in Phys. Rev. D 94 (2016) 084041, having implemented the required primary constraint-enforcing relation to make the Lagrangian degenerate and remove one degree of freedom from the vector field in accordance with the irreducible representations of the Poincaré group. It was later shown in Phys. Rev. D 101 (2020) 045008, ibid 045009, that a secondary constraint-enforcing relation, which trivializes for the generalized Proca theory but not for the SU(2) version, was needed to close the constraint algebra. It is the purpose of this paper to implement this secondary constraint-enforcing relation in GSU2P and to make the construction of the theory more transparent. Since several terms in the Lagrangian were dismissed in Phys. Rev. D 94 (2016) 084041 via their equivalence to other terms through total derivatives, not all of the latter satisfying the secondary constraint-enforcing relation, the work was not so simple as directly applying this relation to the resultant Lagrangian pieces of the old theory. Thus, we were motivated to reconstruct the theory from scratch. In the process, we found the beyond GSU2P.
The transformation of managerial decision-making processes in the digital economy, the modification of the boundaries of the personal space of an employee and manager (manager) when making collegial decisions through social networks and other modern communication tools have been investigated. The problems of assessing the quality of such decisions, the ways and tools of their elimination have been considered. The information base of the article were Russian and foreign researches in the field of management theory and practice, personal observations of the authors, as well as the results of the experiment, conducted by the authors. Such methods of scientific research as analysis, synthesis, generalization, experiment have been used.